Gaming & Culture —

Slow death of split-screen, why ModNation Racers loves it

Splitscreen gaming may not be getting much love these days, but Sony's …

Split-screen gaming is having a hard go of things these days. At GDC the co-op play of Transformers: War for Cybertron was talked up... but you'll have to be online. Hunted: the Demon's Forge was likewise a co-op heavy game, but we were told that you can only play with a friend online. Developers are simply not willing to give up the graphical fidelity to split the screen in two. One game that is excited about split-screen? Sony's ModNation Racers.

"We wanted to make sure we delivered two-player split-screen. From the start, we wanted our two-player split-screen to work online. ModNation Racers enables you and a friend to go online and play the game together," Mat Thomas, game designer for United Front Games said. "Finally, we decided to deliver the four-player couch experience. This was a lot of work, but we have managed to create a great experience where four friends can settle down for some great kart racing. What we have delivered is a fantastic local multiplayer experience reminiscent of some of our best local multiplayer play sessions from years gone by."

Racing games are made for split-screen, and it's great to see the game is really embracing the couch experience. We're looking forward to racing some friends when the game is released for the PlayStation 3 on May 25.

34 Reader Comments

I shake my head at developers every time I see split-screen gaming disappearing. Borderlands (360, PS3, and PC I believe) has it and because of that it's the first game in a while my girlfriend and myself have played together for any length of time.

We both have Xbox Live Gold subscriptions at the moment, but that's nowhere near as enjoyable because our Xbox's are in different locations. There's something about sitting right next to the person on your team that makes all the difference.

Some of the fondest memories from my childhood are of me playing video games with my buddies: Batman: Forever, Ninja Turtles, Contra, Worms . . . the list goes on. ModNation looks very good. Sadly, it's going to be a $60 retail game and with so many great games coming out this year, I just don't know if I can spend that much money on game I will play once a month whenever some friends come over. Maybe, I should invite them more often.

Army of Two (both of them) has fantastic split screen. I've played both on a large screen LCD (50 inch) and a smaller 24 inch widescreen, and it handle them both really well. There is enough room to see around the characters, and yet you can still see what they are doing. Having said that, I've also played split screen Gears Of War, and found it wasn't as good.

I shake my head at developers every time I see split-screen gaming disappearing. Borderlands (360, PS3, and PC I believe) has it and because of that it's the first game in a while my girlfriend and myself have played together for any length of time.

We both have Xbox Live Gold subscriptions at the moment, but that's nowhere near as enjoyable because our Xbox's are in different locations. There's something about sitting right next to the person on your team that makes all the difference.

Supposedly Xbox 360 is all about "connecting"... and yet they seem to think I'd be more interested in connecting with some random, rather than with my mates. The reason Halo 1 was so popular wasn't because it had Xbox Live support (it didn't) it was because you could play with your mates. Same goes for the lack of coop in games these days... it's ruining gaming.

@Viking ZX: you can have both. On the box or in magazines or whatever, let 90% of the screens show the awesome single player experience. Then have a couple shots of the split screen. People aren't really looking at the graphics quality in split screen--they're just noticing that its a nice feature.

Yes, it would take more money and development time, but maybe it's worth it. A lot of people seem to enjoy "party" games.

@Viking ZX: you can have both. On the box or in magazines or whatever, let 90% of the screens show the awesome single player experience. Then have a couple shots of the split screen. People aren't really looking at the graphics quality in split screen--they're just noticing that its a nice feature.

Yes, it would take more money and development time, but maybe it's worth it. A lot of people seem to enjoy "party" games.

Oh I completely agree, you can have both, developers are capable of doing both. On average however, a lot of companies cut corners to meet the launch date and features such as this get cut, which is unfortunate.

Some devs are nice enough to add them later however, like Overlords split screen Co-op mode or Halo 3's 4 person campaign mode.

That's why Halo 3 is so great in the shooter world, they do split screen, it's gameplay over graphics anytime. Just because a few games don't do it to look better doesn't mean it's going away, simply that some devs are more worried about showing off than providing a fun experience. It seems they've lost track of what games are supposed to be about. Glad to see some devs still pushing it though.

Maybe you could go into a slight amount of detail as to why splitting the screen means giving up graphical fidelity. Is it just a resolution cut or is there more to it?

There are three main bottlenecks for modern GPUs: fill rate (calculations done per pixel), vertex processing rate (those done per vertex), and draw calls (number of explicit, different commands sent to the graphics card). Even a naive implementation of splitscreen shouldn't increase fill rate usage, but unless you reduce geometry resolution and cull more objects further away, four-player split-screen essentially quadruples your vertex and draw call counts. You can optimize for this, but it is more work.

I really wish more companies would optomize for it. When I was in college we started shifting from PCs to consoles because of 4 player couch gaming. In fairness I guess we were a minority in many ways. The N64 was far and away the dominant console on campus because it was geared towards 4 player. The PSX was an also-ran. Clearly that wasn't real life. But we put endless hours into nearly any 4 player game we could find.

Flash foward to law school. The GameCube dominates our time. Why? Mario Kart in part, Smash Brothers even more. We were putting in a minimum of 14 hours a week in Smash Brothers. Per person.

Flash forward to business school. I'm still doing most of my gaming on the couch, now it's the 360 leading the charge. But, with rare exception, we won't touch a game single player. A great single player game is less fun than a decent four player game. Sure, we all watched each other play MW2, but then we were stuck. No one wanted to watch anyone else play online, and four player is so choppy and unbalanced (since I honestly can go 20-0 against all my friends) that it leaves us hanging. We actually got two tvs and two 360s in my apartment one night only to find out MW2 can only do one person per system on system link.So we mostly play Halo 3. We're not enormous fans of the game, it's just the only option. And it's only fun 4 on 4, 2 on 2 I still dominate and, obnoxiously, they left out bots. We can go online, but then my friends really get destroyed.

I think a huge part of Halo's success was split screen. Being able to take buddies split screen online was genius. It gave you the best of both worlds. Halo 3's graphics are pretty terrible, though. Reach's, much improved, likely mean we're losing split screen.

Bah. I get that games are sold on graphics, and if MW2 looked worse there'd be grumbling all over the internet. So I understand the decision. I just hate it. We're losing out on something so enormously fun and something everyone can take advantage of for something so minor. Halo 3 has complete crap graphics - basically Halo 2 with better lighting and particles. The geometry is so basic. Did anyone have less fun in the game due to it?

Picture-and-Picture. Also known as PAP, P&P, PBP. You know, something most non-4:3 TV's sold since 2000 have. It's not PiP. It's where you have two different sources displaying one on each half of the screen. Usually, source one on the left and source two on the right. Heck, some TV's even allow up to four sources (one in each corner).

Sure, you still need two consoles and you get smaller "screens" (if you don't want any stretching), but it's great for those non-splitscreen games.

I left a comment on Sony's Playstation ideas sharing site concerning an aspect of this. I hope they find a way to implement it. It goes like this...

Add a button to 3D shutter glasses that changes the alternating left right shuttering to fixed on just the left or right images. Then, we can have two player full screen gaming with a 3D telly. Player one see's only 'left eye' images, whilst Player two see's only 'right eye' images.

Amazing!

I should go and see if anyone has voted the idea up at all. For some reason most people seemed more interested in cross game chat. Dunno why!

Oh, and Modnation Racers, please let us play that "campaign" split-screen like old school Mario Kart! I loved how one player could sacrifice himself to take out the leader and let other player win the race.

When I was in college we started shifting from PCs to consoles because of 4 player couch gaming. In fairness I guess we were a minority in many ways. The N64 was far and away the dominant console on campus because it was geared towards 4 player. The PSX was an also-ran. Clearly that wasn't real life. But we put endless hours into nearly any 4 player game we could find.

Split screen is always more fun than having to play on separate consoles, and no one cares that the graphical detail drops when you play that way. I think most devs are counting on the popularity of their games as stand-alone sales, which is a shame. People are going to really miss this feature if it keeps disappearing.

On a side note, I just bought God of War III last night. I sent a text to my buddies to let them know, and two of them asked about ModNation Racers. I hadn't thought about that as a purchase, but the split screen action--which we've grown to love with MKW and SMBW--really appeals to these folks. Hell, I may even get a couple extra controllers out of this--on their dime.

While I like having full real estate, I hate the fact with our direction where each player have to buy their own machine and game; just to play together. I have a PS3 and we're mostly in this type of situation.

This kind of direction is making me to seriously consider buying "family-friendly" console, like Nintendo, in the future unless Sony/game developers do more to produce multiplayer games playing from the same machine.

While we're at it - to retain full screen real estate, why not develop a console that is able to handle multiple monitor where each player gets their own screen, all playing from the same machine using only one game disc? Now THAT will be an improvement !

Halo. This, along with the fact that it's one of the few hardcore holdouts (i.e., among other things, no unlockables; I love Bad Company 2 as much as the next guy, but multiplayer FPS unlockables = cheap and "casual"), is why I think Halo should get more love than it does these days.

And I disagree that Halo 3 has bad graphics anywhere but the character models. Plus, 60 frames per second vs, for example, Gears of War's 30 fps. Actually, after it came out I read somewhere that it actually had 2 frames per frame: one for the high end of the dynamic range and one for the low end. So really, 120 fps.

When I was in college we started shifting from PCs to consoles because of 4 player couch gaming. In fairness I guess we were a minority in many ways. The N64 was far and away the dominant console on campus because it was geared towards 4 player. The PSX was an also-ran. Clearly that wasn't real life. But we put endless hours into nearly any 4 player game we could find.

i guess it can also be a issue of economics. No split screen, more sales.

Not the way I see it. Seems that families would be less likely to buy if they can't play together.

Exactly. No multiplayer experience beats drinking Mario Kart with your friends. Also, imagine if Hollywood decided to go with this approach. You cant watch movies with your friends, you each have to buy a copy and chat while watching in your individual houses. It's absurd, and needs to stop.

i guess it can also be a issue of economics. No split screen, more sales.

Not the way I see it. Seems that families would be less likely to buy if they can't play together.

Exactly. No multiplayer experience beats drinking Mario Kart with your friends. Also, imagine if Hollywood decided to go with this approach. You cant watch movies with your friends, you each have to buy a copy and chat while watching in your individual houses. It's absurd, and needs to stop.

iirc, that was a argument back when VHS made it big. I think the movie corps spokes person wanted anything above two people to be labeled as a performance, meaning it was royalties payment time.